


Weight

by Kainosite



Category: Political RPF - UK 20th-21st c.
Genre: Abuse, Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Thatcherites, Tory CPverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-22
Updated: 2012-02-22
Packaged: 2017-10-31 14:04:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/344846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kainosite/pseuds/Kainosite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maggie has been a bit too free with the cane, and now Geoffrey has a problem.  The rest of the Cabinet comes to his rescue, for a given value of ‘rescue’.  Warnings for discussion of abuse, caning and Margaret Thatcher.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Weight

It would be easier, Geoffrey thought miserably, if he could convince himself that she needed it, that he was helping her somehow.  That it was stress relief, or a way of calming her nerves.  But she was as imperious and self-assured on the days she didn’t whip him as she was on the days she did.  The confidence, the cutting wit, the effortless mastery of her brief- it all came from her, not from the things she did to Geoffrey.  She didn’t need to push him down to make herself strong.  He could drop dead where he sat and it wouldn’t make a jot of difference to her.  
  
The idea had a certain appeal.  Commons benches were unbearable on a freshly caned bottom, and sitting through Prime Minister’s Questions like this was torture.  On a wooden chair Geoffrey could sit on the edge of the seat to keep his weight off the welts, and on a soft sofa he sank in so that there was only a gentle pressure on his injuries, but the green benches in the Commons combined the worst features of both.  They were just yielding enough to make it impossible to keep his welts out of contact with the cushion, and the hard leather surface was merciless against the bruised skin.  
  
But he couldn’t so much as wince, not with the eyes of the whole House on the Treasury Bench.  He had to sit up and look attentive, or at least project a ministerial gravity, and say ‘Hear, hear!’ at appropriate intervals and laugh at her jokes and all the rest of it.  And every so often when Kinnock was rambling and she didn’t need to listen too closely she would glance over him and smile slightly.  And down the row Norman Tebbit kept smirking at him, because he knew somehow, Norman always knew when she’d beaten him, and Geoffrey had to sit there in helpless humiliation while they basked in his suffering.  
  
The shoe would be on the other foot if he dropped dead.  He would have a lovely funeral, and everyone would come and they’d all have to say nice things about him and pretend to be sorry he was dead.  Even she would have to pretend.  And she’d have to give some sort of statement to the House, too, and say he’d been a brilliant Chancellor and a splendid Foreign Secretary and it was a terrible loss to the Government.  And she’d hate it even more than Geoffrey hated this.  
  
The one downside was that Geoffrey wouldn’t be around to enjoy it.  
  
“You could come back as a ghost and haunt her,” Nigel had suggested when he’d mentioned it.  
  
“I wouldn’t want to be a bother,” Geoffrey said.  But after everything she’d put him through, he thought perhaps he might come back just long enough to hear his eulogy.  
  
At least today’s ordeal was nearly over.  If Prime Minister’s Questions ran for the full hour it would have been more than Geoffrey could bear, but they were mercifully brief, and even she had the decency not to cane him before his own departmental questions.  So far, anyway; perhaps that misery still lurked on the horizon.  But so far he had only been required to suffer like this for fifteen minutes at a time, and today there were just a few more questions to endure until he could slink back to his office and drown his sorrows in brandy and paracetamol.  
  
He stared at the benches opposite and let his mind drift, trying to forget about Norman’s sly glances and the throbbing pain in his rear.  It was easy enough not to listen; as soon as he stopped trying to pick out a single voice among the multitude, the general hubbub in the Chamber buried everything beneath a blanket of white noise.  Even the strident tones of the Prime Minister could not make themselves heard above the crowd without Geoffrey’s willing collusion.  His inattention felt like a victory, like he’d secretly wrested something of himself out of her grasp.  
  
Then it was all over, and Geoffrey was free, and the Speaker was calling for order so he could bring in the next business, and she rose for the last time and swept out the door, offering Geoffrey a final little smile as she passed him like a lover sharing a secret.  Ever the loyal pet wolf, Norman stood up and prowled after her, and the whole Treasury Bench sagged in relief as they passed behind the Speaker’s Chair.  The Opposition too, from the look of things- Hattersley leaned over and whispered something to Kinnock, and the Labour leader laughed with an ease Geoffrey never saw in him while she was in the Chamber.  
  
Geoffrey felt better already, but there was still one more trial to be endured before he could make his dash for freedom.  Agonizing as the green benches were, the sudden release of the pressure against his welts was twelve times worse, almost as bad as another stroke of the cane.  Nigel had cried once, from standing, which had earned him some rather odd looks from the benches opposite.  Geoffrey liked to think he was made of sterner stuff- at the very least he ought to be used to this by now- but it was always an ordeal.  He levered himself to his feet, gritting his teeth against the pain.  
  
It took all his willpower not to wince, and for a moment a dark cloud descended over his vision, but after a few shaky breaths the pain ebbed and he started to make his way down the narrow aisle between the table and the Treasury bench, carefully picking his way over his colleagues’ feet.  As he reached the clerks a hand caught his elbow.  
  
“Geoffrey, you’re bleeding through again,” a soft voice said in his ear- Fowler, the other Norman, their Norman, not the evil one.  Geoffrey instinctively tried to turn to face his captor, which would have been a disaster, but Norman’s fingers dug into his arm and he realized he was about to flash his bloodstained trousers at the Opposition and stopped himself in time.  
  
“It’s all right,” Norman said, so quietly that Geoffrey had to strain to hear him.  “I don’t think anyone else saw, and if we’re quick no one will.  I’ll walk behind you until we get past the benches, and then we can put our backs to the wall and shuffle over to the Ayes Lobby.  It will look a little strange, but in all the milling about I doubt anyone will notice.”  
  
Geoffrey nodded dumbly, too overcome with gratitude and humiliation to find words.  He could have borne it all so much better if it didn’t make things so difficult for everyone around him.  This morning’s beating had been vicious, but the blow that cut the deepest came not from the cane, but from young Stephen’s white face when Geoffrey came out of her study and found him waiting on the sofa for the next meeting.  He couldn’t hear what was said, of course, but the crack of the cane carried easily through the door.  He’d flinched when Geoffrey came into the room and looked away, unable to meet his eyes, scarcely able to look at him.  
  
The poor man had been as mortified by the whole sorry business as Geoffrey was.  Frightened, too, and to no purpose whatsoever.  It was one thing to make an example of Geoffrey in front of the Cabinet, but sweet, mild-mannered Stephen Sherbourne didn’t have a defiant bone in his body.  He was just a political secretary, not a politician, and he didn’t need implicit threats to persuade him to do her bidding.  They could only serve to put him off.  It was bad management as well as bad manners for her to bully Geoffrey in front of him.  
  
Now poor Norman had been drawn into it as well, and he wasn’t the only one.  On the bench beside them Michael scowled and muttered, “Oh, not _again_ ,” and from behind him Geoffrey heard Nigel ask what was going on.  Fortunately half the Cabinet were standing by now and Nigel couldn’t get to them through the crush.  With a little luck they might be able to sidle over to the Ayes Lobby and duck out of sight before he managed to escape the Chamber.  Geoffrey hated to avoid him, but he hated involving him in this even more.  
  
It was hardest for Nigel, because unlike the others he genuinely liked and respected Geoffrey- at least, Geoffrey liked to think he did- and it pained him to see his mentor so ill-treated.  Poor Nigel had a nervous disposition, and she would have driven him to a mental breakdown if she tried to bully him the way she did Geoffrey.  But tormenting Geoffrey struck just close enough to home to keep him frightened and subservient, without destroying him to the point where he was unable to do his job and she had to find a replacement.  It was half the reason she did it, Geoffrey suspected, the other half being simple malice.  
  
Geoffrey shuffled past Michael, who had folded his arms defiantly across his chest and was now glaring at his shoes like a sulky teenager, and Norman followed just behind, shielding the damning evidence of their leader’s excesses from the hungry eyes of the Opposition and the Wets on the back benches.  As he came into the open space beyond the table Norman grabbed his elbow again.  
  
“Who’s sitting on the stairs?  Can you see from here?”  
  
“Does it matter?”  Geoffrey asked, baffled.  
  
“They’re going to get an eyeful of your trousers.”  
  
“Oh.  Right.”  Geoffrey craned his neck so he could see around the bench.  “It’s the chap who replaced poor Anthony.  You know, the one with the lips.”  
  
“Portillo?  That’s all right, then; he wants a job.  He’ll keep his mouth shut.  Come on.”  
  
“How do you keep track of all these backbenchers?” Geoffrey asked as they hurried over to the Officials’ Box, past the bemused eyes of young Portillo.  “I can’t tell half of them apart, much less sift out the ambitious ones from the chaff.”  
  
“We’re not going to be around forever, as poor Anthony found out rather precipitately.  It’s irresponsible not to be thinking about who is going to replace us,” Norman said.  Geoffrey backed himself against the wall and began edging toward the door.  
  
“So you’re scouting out your successor for when you get murdered by the IRA?” he asked, unsure whether to be impressed or appalled.  “That’s a bit morbid, isn’t it?”  
  
“Not just the IRA.  It’s no picnic having Social Services, I can tell you.  You know they gave me two guards last conference?  Apparently that’s more than anyone but her and Other Norman, and mine said his weren’t armed.”  
  
“They were probably meant to restrain him, not the crowd,” Geoffrey said, only half joking.  
  
Norman sniggered.  “I’d want to be armed for that!  Really, though, you never worry?  Flying off to all those international summits and war zones and Third World hot spots the way you do?  You must think about it.”  
  
“I always feel _safer_ when I’m abroad,” Geoffrey admitted.  
  
Norman’s eyes flicked down to his bloodstained trousers, now mercifully hidden against the wall.  “Oh.  Right.”  
  
That seemed to have killed the conversation stone dead, although Geoffrey hadn’t meant to.  He didn’t have the heart to try to resuscitate it, and from the way Norman was studiously examining the carpet, he was too embarrassed to make his own attempt.  Instead they inched along in uncomfortable silence.  It might have been for the best, as the MPs who had queued behind them realized that their forward progress had mysteriously slowed to this snail-like creep along the wall and began to overtake them, shooting them quizzical looks as they passed.  
  
On the other side of the Speaker’s chair, the Opposition were leaving the Chamber too, with Kinnock at the head of the column chattering merrily to Hattersley, who kept trying and failing to get a word in edgewise.  He seemed to be taking his conversational trampling in good humor, laughing at his leader’s jokes and just rolling his eyes in fond exasperation each time Kinnock interrupted him.  But Geoffrey supposed it was easier, when the interruptions were born of enthusiasm rather than contempt.  They always seemed so happy together.  
  
He couldn’t help feeling a bit envious.  It was an illusion, of course, a cheerful public façade to cover a grim reality.  Everyone knew of the terrible divisions within the Labour Party.  But he didn’t think the affection they showed for each other could be entirely feigned.  Every party wanted to appear unified in public, but real animosity was impossible to conceal; one could tell straight off that that video of Kinnock and Benn having a friendly drink together was a publicity stunt, and not a very good one.  Geoffrey had read somewhere that contempt was the hardest emotion to hide.  A sneer was the only asymmetrical facial expression and it always showed through, even when one tried to mask it with a smile.  
  
As if to illustrate the point, the other Opposition front bench hurried by next, Steel pale and tight-lipped as his partner loudly and very publicly berated him for something he had said or failed to say in his question earlier.  Geoffrey felt a tug of fellow-feeling for the little Liberal, but they swept past before he could catch his eye.  Next they were overtaken by the better part of the Shadow Treasury team, laughing and looking back over their shoulders.  
  
“We’re fine, we’re fine,” Gould assured his junior ministers, but a moment later the ferrety one yelped, “Oh shit, he’s coming!” and they all scrambled through the door, nearly trampling Norman and Geoffrey in their haste.  Dennis Skinner came pushing through the crowd by the Speaker’s chair and charged after them.  
  
“Out of the way, Tories!” he barked, shoving Norman aside so hard he almost lost his balance and fell on Geoffrey, and tore off in hot pursuit of his colleagues.  
  
“That was rude,” Geoffrey said, offering Norman a steadying hand.  
  
Norman laughed.  “Actually, I think that’s the nicest thing he’s ever said to me.  He usually accuses me of trying to murder the elderly.”  
  
“He could have said ‘Excuse me, fascist oppressors.’ Left-wing fanaticism is no excuse for bad manners,” Geoffrey said.  
  
“No, I suppose not,” Norman conceded, still chuckling.  
  
Geoffrey had finally made it to the edge of the door.  He ducked into the alcove by the Ayes Lobby with great relief, and Norman nipped neatly around the door to join him.  He stationed himself on Geoffrey’s far side, as straight-backed and watchful as a soldier standing guard.  
  
“It’s very kind of you, but you needn’t stay, if you don’t want.  I’m all right now that I have a wall,” Geoffrey said.  
  
“Oh, I don’t mind.  Besides, a wall is one thing, but you’ll look rather odd lingering by it without a conversation partner,” said Norman, eyeing the crowd of MPs who were now streaming through the doors without noticing them.  
  
“I’m terribly grateful,” Geoffrey said.  
  
“Of course you are.  You wouldn’t be _in_ this mess if you weren’t so bloody polite all the time,” snapped Michael, appearing suddenly from behind the door like a scowling sun popping out of the clouds.  “It’s your own fault, you know.  She bullies you because you let her.  When will you people stop being so afraid of her?”  
  
“When she stops being so frightening, I imagine,” Norman said, a wry quirk in the corners of his mouth.  Michael shifted his solar glare to Norman, who met it levelly.  
  
“He’s right, though,” Geoffrey said, before Michael could return fire and start a row.  “It _is_ my fault.  It’s because I can’t stand up to her.  You all do it wonderfully, but I just don’t seem to have the knack.  She hates me because I’m such a coward.”  
  
“And you’re boring,” Michael agreed.  
  
“ _Michael_ ,” Norman said through gritted teeth.  
  
“What?  It’s true.  I’m sure he knows already; _she’s_ told him, if nothing else.”  
  
Norman was opening his mouth to reply when Nigel trundled round the door, shoving Michael out of his way with the amiable inevitability of an oncoming glacier.  
  
“What’s going on?  Are we having a secret meeting?” he asked, panting a little from the exertion of catching up to them.  
  
Geoffrey sighed.  His protégé was well-meaning, but sometimes he could be a bit thick.  
  
“A secret meeting in the Waiting Lobby after Prime Minister’s Questions?”  
  
“I don’t know!”  Nigel said in a wounded tone.  “Maybe you’re not very good at secrecy.”  
  
Michael snorted derisively.  
  
“They’re not meeting, they’re hiding.  She’s beaten Geoffrey bloody again, so he’s stuck here until the crowd clears,” he explained with customary tact.  Norman and Nigel both winced, and Geoffrey wished, as he quite often wished these days, that he could melt through the floor.  
  
Nigel laughed nervously.  “Well, just as long as it’s not me.”  
  
“It’s precisely that attitude that guarantees it _will_ be you.  If the whole Cabinet stood up to her-”  
  
“Are you suggesting that we unionize?” Norman asked, amused.  
  
“Don’t be an ass, Fowler.  I’m just saying that we should all take a firm line and demand that she treat us with the respect we deserve.”  
  
“It wouldn’t work.  She’d just sack us,” Nigel said.  
  
“She can’t sack all of us, idiot.  If she sacks you it will bring down the Government, if you don’t manage to bring it down first all on your own.”  
  
Nigel sniffed.  “I’d like to see _you_ run the Treasury!  You can’t even manage to lose a log book!   Anyway, she wouldn’t have to sack all of us, she’d just have to sack the ringleader.  Which would be you.”  
  
“I don’t care if she does sack me.  I’ve about had it.  I didn’t stand for Parliament so I could be bullied by a megalomaniacal harridan with a bouffant like a sodding Pomeranian.”  
  
“You can’t hold her hair to your high standards, Michael,” Norman murmured.  
  
“I mean it.  If she tries to pull any more of this rubbish with me I’ll resign.  I don’t mind being thrashed when I’ve cocked up- those are the rules- but we don’t have cabinet government, we have an autocracy.”  
  
“That’s a bit extreme,” Norman said.  
  
“Is it?  Is it really?”  
  
“I think it is,” Geoffrey said.  “We have _most_ of a Cabinet.  When you and Norman disagree with her, she lets you have your say.  It’s just me she never listens to.”  
  
“It’s just you she bothers to interrupt, you mean.  Leon and Other Norman never disagree with her, Keith came up with half her ideas in the first place, Tom and Peter never talk at all, and Willie just waffles.  And Nigel tries to disagree and then backs down the moment she frowns at him.  So what you’re saying is we have a Prime Minister, a Defense Secretary, a Social Services Secretary and half a Chancellor.  I don’t call that a Cabinet.”  
  
Norman smirked.  “I don’t think anyone would describe Nigel as half a Chancellor.  A Chancellor and a half, perhaps.”  
  
“It’s easy for you to laugh, she likes _you_!” Nigel said, stung into taking Michael’s side.  
  
Norman shook his head.  “She likes Other Norman and she liked Cecil.  The rest of us she tolerates, on a good day.”  
  
“Then Geoffrey’s never had a good day.  What are we going to do about it, that’s what I’d like to know,” Michael said, folding his arms stubbornly across his chest and glaring around their little circle as if he was hoping they would start a revolution then and there.  
  
As ever, Norman was more temperate.  “Right now we’re going to find some way of getting him back to his office so he can change.  You do have a spare suit, don’t you?”  
  
Geoffrey nodded.  “I always keep one now.”  
  
“You should send her your dry cleaning bill,” Michael grumbled.  
  
“I’ve been putting it on expenses,” he admitted.  “Although I think they’re starting to wonder what I’ve been up to.”  
  
“Compared to Cecil’s dry cleaning it’s probably pretty tame,” said Nigel, and everyone sniggered.  
  
“Fine, so we’re treating the symptoms instead of the disease, like usual.” Michael rolled his eyes.  “How do we get across Whitehall without anyone seeing Geoffrey’s trousers?  He can’t just sit around in the Library until it gets dark.”  
  
“He can’t sit anywhere at all,” Nigel said, sniggering some more.  
  
Michael and Norman exchanged irritated glances, but Geoffrey didn’t mind.  Nigel couldn’t cope with the abuse except through flippancy.  It preyed on him, and Geoffrey knew that long after the others had dealt with the immediate crisis and forgotten all about him, Nigel would still be stopping by the Foreign Office with his clumsy little gestures of comfort, pastries or funny memos or a nice bottle of wine that had been ‘left over’ from some Treasury function and he needed someone to help him finish, would Geoffrey by any chance be interested?  Compassion came easier to those for whom it came less dear.  
  
“Last time I asked Norman to run to the cloakroom and get my coat, but I didn’t wear one today.  It’s never happened in the summer before,” Geoffrey said, returning his thoughts to the matter at hand.  
  
Michael snorted.  “I don’t think you can rely on her to take the weather into account.”  
  
“If we form a sort of phalanx around him couldn’t we just walk him back?” Nigel asked.  “I didn’t see anything in the Chamber with Norman in the way, and it’s not as though the press will be trying to photograph his bottom.  We just have to stand so we’d block a casual glimpse of it.”  
  
“We don’t need a phalanx for that.  If _you_ walk behind him no one will even be able to see he’s there,” Michael said.  
  
“Ha ha, very funny.  Maybe your _hair_ should walk behind him.”  
  
“Maybe _your_ hair should walk to Boots and buy some shampoo.”  
  
As they descended into a particularly juvenile and incoherent spate of bickering, Geoffrey turned to Norman, who was watching the Chancellor and the Minister of Defense squabble with that air of polite incredulity he often wore.  
  
“I really am very grateful.  To all of you.  I don’t think I could go on, if I couldn’t rely on your support.  Perhaps that would be for the best, but I don’t-” Geoffrey broke off to swallow a sudden lump in his throat.  Norman studied him inscrutably through his glasses.  
  
“I don’t want to serve in a Cabinet without a Foreign Secretary,” he said.  
  
“Then I really should resign,” Geoffrey concluded glumly.  It was a constant temptation.  His arse _throbbed_.  
  
Norman smiled.  “I was about to say, ‘So I’m glad we have such a good one.’”  
  
“But I’m not good, am I?  I’m not.  I’m dismal.  I think I _could_ be good, if only she would hear me out.  But I don’t know how to argue with her, and I’m no use to anyone if she refuses to heed a word I say.”  
  
“She’s not the only one listening.  And I think you’ll find that however quiet your words, they carry more weight than those of others who shout louder.”  He nodded at Michael, who was still exchanging playground insults with Nigel, oblivious to their conversation.  
  
“‘Like being savaged by a dead sheep,’” Geoffrey quoted bitterly.  “I suppose it’s an especially _heavy_ sheep.”  
  
“I almost got killed by a sheep once.  It was during my National Service; we were out on maneuvers during training and I had to cross this field, and there were sheep grazing and one of them took a dislike to me.  Halfway across there was a ravine with a little stream running through it, and as I was picking my way down the bank the damned thing charged me.  Knocked me head over heels.  I nearly split my head open on a rock at the bottom.”  Norman grinned, that thin smile of his that stretched from ear to ear.  “It just goes to show, you never know what a little pressure in the right place can do.”  
  
He was probably referring to the supposed weight of Geoffrey’s counsel, but Geoffrey’s mind went instantly to the cane.  It was nothing to look at, a little stick of wood no thicker than his finger, but when it was applied with sufficient viciousness and skill it could make a mouse of a minister.  She didn’t need it; a few choice words and one of those superior little smiles would have been enough to cow them and bend them to her will.  But if there wasn’t that recklessness in her, that irresistible compulsion to take everything too far, they wouldn’t be in this position in the first place, standing against a wall to hide the blood on his trousers.  Or in Government at all, most likely.  
  
Which was the crux of the problem.  For all her cruelty, Geoffrey didn’t want to topple her.  Even Michael didn’t really; it was all a load of tough talk and hot air to cover for the fact that he was just as much in awe and terror of her as the rest of them.  She was glorious, she was the greatest Prime Minister they’d had since Churchill, and the last thing any of them wanted to do was undermine her.  Geoffrey wanted to _help_ her.  But she didn’t want help, not from him.  It would be simplest to resign.  
  
Yet pressing back from the other side was Norman, telling stupid anecdotes about sheep to try and lift his spirits, and blustery, brittle Michael, and most of all there was poor Nigel with his fears and his clumsy affection and his immense responsibilities.  He couldn’t leave Nigel alone with her, not if there was any other choice.  And he hated the thought of slinking out of the Government with his tail between his legs, of letting her have the last word.  He would have to stay the course.  
  
“Shall we go?” he said, and Norman nodded, and the other two dropped their argument and formed up behind him, and together they walked out of the Palace of Westminster into the bright afternoon.


End file.
